🗄️ [Documentation] - Information on how to not let money roll over from last month.

[sinistersnare]

Description

Hi, is there a way to not roll over the budget from last month into the current month?

I want every month to start from a clean slate. I've looked through the docs and I have played around with the UI. It may not be possible, but I figured I would ask. And I would be happy to contribute the docs if it does exist.

Basically, I don't want to use the 'cover overspending' feature because it messes with my pretty numbers on the budget. My budgeting is pretty loose, so I just want to make sure that overall, I spend less than the budget amount. But if the numbers increase each month, then its harder to see at a glance that I am under-budget overall.

Category

Budgeting

[sinistersnare]

Docs should be added for the difference between 'Rollover' and 'Report' modes when the feature is stabilized.

[tjex]

From what I understand you just want to account for overspending within the same month by just increasing the budgeted amount for each row as you over spend in that month, rather than having the values roll over into the next month and having to adjust there?

Wouldn't the solution for each month to start clean be to just remove rollover spending from your rows?
shown here

[sinistersnare]

Covering overspending affects the next month, which is pretty annoying. This is mostly fixed by the 'Report' mode, but that mode disables 'Cover overspending' so its fine.

[tjex]

I don't really understand what you mean now.

But in principle. If you overspend, then it needs to be accounted for (covered), by pulling that money from somewhere.
This can happen in a few different ways.

Case 1:
You account for it from the available amount of money (ie unassigned / not yet assigned money) that you still have available to budget in that month.
Result: This will reduce the money you have the next month to budget

Case 2:
You account for it from a category in that month with surplus amount (ie money remaining in that categories' budget) and this category has 'rollover spending' enabled.
Result: the budgeted amount you have for this category in the following month will be reduced

Case 3:
You turn off rollover overspending for all your categories. If you overspend, this will automatically deduct from your total amount to be budgeted for the next month (but not on a per category basis).

Let me know if that helps / covers the issue. If it does, consider closing the issue, as information on how to 'not let money roll over' is by default taken care of by providing information of how to let money rollover in the first place (as linked in my first reply)

[sinistersnare]

This is kind of discussed in the Actual issue, but the problem is simply that each month I want my misc budget to say (for example) $200. But at the end of the month, I can use that money to cover another budget. However when I do that, when I click 'copy last months budget' in the following month, it will copy the lesser amount and not $200.

Im happy to close this, I figured this issue could be a springboard for the report budget type, but if you think that it is unneeded, I am happy to close it.

[j-f1]

However when I do that, when I click 'copy last months budget' in the following month, it will copy the lesser amount and not $200.

Are you looking for the “goal template” feature? It’s currently in development but it allows you to set a pre-defined amount for each budget category, and you can fill in values for all the categories with one click.

Im happy to close this, I figured this issue could be a springboard for the report budget type, but if you think that it is unneeded, I am happy to close it.

We definitely want to expose the report budget type by default but it needs documentation written (and any bugs ironed out if there are any) before we can do that.

[tjex]

However when I do that, when I click 'copy last months budget' in the following month, it will copy the lesser amount and not $200.

ahhh ok. I get it now! For now I guess you could just always work two months ahead?

eg, make a budget for april with clean numbers, go to May, 'copy last months budget'. Then once April rolls around, go to June and do the same: 'copy last months budget', which will copy the clean numbers from May.

This way you're always copying a budget from a month that does not have any transactions in it yet, and will therefore have clean numbers.

[shall0pass]

@sinistersnare If you have time, could you look over the documentation page I started for the Report Budget? I don't use the Report budget type, so I may have made some bad assumptions on the workflow. It would be great if you could correct me where I made mistakes.